Authors: Craig Saunders
'Fuck
you,' she said. 'I'm not screaming for you.' Her fingernails snapped against
the rough road while she dragged herself away, slow, but better than turning
her face to the sun and waiting for a blade to fall.
Why
won't he say anything? That fucking screech, screech, screech...
O'Dell's
blade didn't fall. Instead, George's wheelchair stopped beside her, the sound
just metal on the road, but not a blade. Simply rubber shredded from a steel
wheel.
Francis,
half-blind from the flash, knew it was him, though it couldn't be.
'George?'
It
couldn't be.
When
she'd left him two days ago, with food and drink on his lap, he'd been no more
animated than a zombie. He hadn't been able to move at all.
Now,
though, he could. George reached out with a weak, shaking hand and Francis
tried to raise her head toward his palm, desperate to know if he was real or if
he, too, was just a cruel dream.
When
they touched, that was when he could speak and Francis could listen.
Francis.
Outside, there
was only destruction. Inside, her fear was pushed aside and there was only
George. Like a child might hold a parent's leg, not wanting them to go, Francis
clung to George.
I
was afraid
.
But for myself. For me,
she said. A thing she would
never say aloud, and never to any other child.
We're
safe here,
said George.
Are you angry with Edgar?
You shouldn't
be.
He's afraid, too.
You're
just a kid. But you're pretty smart.
Yeah,
he
said in
his
voice, not that wiser, somehow older voice.
I'm not a
div.
People think
they can't smile in their thoughts. They're wrong.
George?
What they did to you? I don't know how we can go on. I think Edgar's dying. I'm
a mess. You're...
Don't
sweat it, sister
, said George.
Just a flesh wound.
He
was right, too. She felt it. Where once his eyes were blank, now there was life.
As he could see through her, she could see through him. Her body was on the
road while they spoke, eyes closed. But she could still
see.
He
was healing. He wheeled himself to her, didn't he? When she left, he could only
take water.
In
just two days?
He didn't
answer, but his hand burned against her head. A warmth like a too-hot bath,
making her head swim and her muscles give in.
It's
okay, Francis,
he said.
It's okay to sleep.
Francis'
strength and resolve broke and the last of that fight in her, innate, left. She
tumbled all the way down to a long sleep, sheltered from the poisoned skies.
*
Edgar's
watched the dead boy move, reach out. The kid was such a horrible mess that
Edgar, at first, thought the kid was dead in charge of a wheelchair.
Points
on your licence
, he thought as he fumbled at the handle for his door, but
his hand was clumsy and helpless. He had to shuffle across the seat until he
could hop down from the driver's side.
'You're
the boy...'
Edgar
got no further. Close enough to see the kid (everything blurred, but close
enough) he saw how badly the kid was messed up. His head was horrifically
scarred, his eyes blank. He looked like death. He
smelled
like death.
He
couldn't speak. Of course not.
Because
he's the better part of dead.
Lobotomised.
A corpse in a chair. A Halloween mannequin for a fire...who could never have
spoken to Francis. How could he have told Francis to come for him?
Because...he's
special. That's what Francis said, wasn't it?
But not just
that. Edgar
knew
the kid was special. He could feel it, like heat that
rose straight from the kid's skin to his.
Edgar moved his
disjointed left hand to take the boy's hand from Francis. At that touch, he
lost himself and fell to the tarmac right there alongside Francis.
Edgar,
said George, directly into the old man's mind.
Pleased to meet you.
'You're
George,' mumbled Edgar.
Why
does he need me?
he wondered, thinking his thoughts careless, like human's
do because they think no one listens. But George listened.
It's
not me that needs you,
said the boy,
Francis will
.
Sometime
later, George released Edgar and told him the same thing he told Francis: It
was fine to sleep.
She
was right. You're
something, alright,
thought Edgar, but lazily, as
he slid toward welcome sleep. George wasn't sure about that, but a ghost of a
smile flickered on a face he couldn't yet control, and he watched over them
both.
*
IX.
Retirement
In
the weeks Edgar and Francis and George hid, and healed, the world turned.
The
seasons of the apocalypse hadn't, yet, begun. Nuclear winters and ultraviolet
summers that would last decades were a bad sunrise yet to break the horizon.
O'Dell
ate, slept, drank.
Dormant,
almost.
He
watched the world begin to fall. Earth, an undignified drunk who staggered with
his hands out to stop a fall he knew he could not avoid.
O'Dell
wore his crazed, yellow-toothed grin all the while and thought he was content
enough - maybe even happy - to be a mere passenger now, just a last observer to
the end.
The
first of many heavy rains to come hit England during the fourth week after that
first crown of fire. For now, the weather was just a foreshadow. When the reign
of fire ended, snow and storms of ice would succeed to the throne.
In
Norway, the lead singer from a death metal band named 'Jotunheimr' emerged at
the head a cult of lunatic wanna-be Vikings, seeking to appease the frost
giants that ravaged the world. They and their exulted ruler began with murder
and finished only when he and his followers surrounded The Storting and
detonated themselves. If this was Ragnarok come, if Fenris' cold, stinking
breath filled the abyssal skies, then at least they died believing they had
been right.
Many
believed
they
were right. Either they were all right in their beliefs
and there always had been room for a thousand gods, or all but one, or none at
all.
O'Dell,
warm, ensconced with his concrete walls, watched and grinned while fire danced
in cities. Reporters yelled and the world went mad as O'Dell's money (he was
never short of money - he had whatever he needed and whenever he needed it)
paid nearly twenty thousand people across the world a handsome fee to pour
vials of U+03BF into city water supplies. Madness even before the compound took
hold - paid in coin to kill the world where greed might have been worth
something.
The
Boss watched, O'Dell knew, but mostly left O'Dell to manage his own affairs. The
first call after the first missile:
'
Let
the madness take hold, and they'll burn themselves, like a man might set a match
against a leech on his skin - the only sure cure.'
'Sir,' replied
O'Dell.
The
call O'Dell waited on wouldn't be for another three weeks. He was just as impatient
as ever, but he'd waited nearly sixty years for that call, hadn't he?
But
the world
was
burning itself to cure the madness...his boss right on
that count. Mostly, he was right. So O'Dell waited, itchy, but he watched night
and day, sleepless as ever, as riots lit the night around the globe, in places
U+03BF touched, but places it did not reach, too, as hatreds old and new
spread. Mosques or Synagogues or Churches were attacked, first. Immigrants - first,
second, third generation, illegal and legal, native born or otherwise.
News
outlets fuelled panic because fear sold. Later, they tried for a quieter,
calmer approach: Fear sells, but if everyone's dead, there's no one left to
sell it to.
News,
as O'Dell knew very well, was an unruly and wilful child.
U+03BF
- invisible and insidious - just like O'Dell and his boss. Like
US,
too.
'They'll
all burn, and they can't touch us,'
he whispered once, bloated on glee at
his victory, and didn't know he spoke. There was no '
US
' in his room.
Just him.
Madness
caught like a disease. People assumed contagion. Panic ruled and people fled.
They crossed bridges and then, later, they crossed states or provinces and
mountain ranges, only to find there was nowhere left to run.
China,
Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Japan, the Philippines. Parts of
Australia, as far as New Zealand. In Eastern Africa, from Asmara, south to
Nairobi, war erupted and escalated. Cairo burned from incendiary bombs, but by
then, no one was sure who was dropping what on whom. Power stations failed.
Institutions fell. Men and women were dragged from expensive offices high above
cities and murdered savagely beside those who cleaned those offices and made
the wealthy their sandwiches.
Madness
catches and like disease, it did not discriminate.
Then,
the future O'Dell saw so many years ago arrived.
NATO
recalled soldiers from foreign fields, as did the US, the British, the Australians,
the Canadians. Ships headed for home.
But
beneath the sea, submarines full of hidden fire lurked and hunted and planes
that fly at high altitudes headed elsewhere.
*
O'Dell
felt it, like he understood and sensed so many things - a tingling, a strange
sensation of turning inward and seeing things happen inside his head. Not
imagined, but a foreshadow. He reached a hand toward the telephone on his desk
before it rang.
'Sir,'
he said.
'Okay,
O'Dell. It's time. The children are yours.'
'Thank
you, Sir,' he said. He thought it was maybe the only time he'd ever said those
words to his boss. Probably the last, too.
Smiling,
or grinning - there was no real difference - his body shaking in anticipation
and seizing, too, he closed his eyes and called his children, so that he would
no longer be just one man, but all of them.
'All
of US,'
they said together.
O'Dell
alone was nothing. But he was not alone. The children, the work of decades...these
were his tools. His army of children against the world. They were US and
together, they pushed. A war of mind against matter in a world that worshipped
steel and stone and atoms.
*
Sensible,
erudite men and women shook hands across airwaves and via satellites as their governments
began to understand the extent, and danger, of these worldwide acts. Not viral,
but chemical. Yet while the United States denied any involvement in the terror
of Vladivostok or Hangzhou, the Russian and the Chinese looked away as
Philadelphia rioted. Cameras captured bodies burning and eviscerated, hanging
from city windows. It would soon be Christmas. This year people were the
decorations.
Even
so, even pushed so
hard
, for a beat, the sane held sway. Then, confusion.
Retaliation
is the only recourse
, said so many while their minds bled and red stained
blouses and shirts in bunkers and seats of power around the globe.
Sudden,
explicit anger, the kind that lashed out with angry fists. Panicked chatter
across secure channels that covered the world like a thin skein of silk, or a
web spun by paranoid spiders, followed by blindly stabbing fingers on buttons
with no clear enemy in mind.
Nothing
inside their minds except
US
.
*
That
night, while bombs rained down, O'Dell closed his eyes and released
US
.
Returning
to himself was a relief and like a tearing of his soul.
Moments
later, the phone rang. Blissful, tearful, but sated at last, O'Dell let his
moment last a while longer before he took the receiver in his right hand. His
left hand was spastic and useless, his lip and white shirt blood-soaked and him
unaware of either thing. He was full of fire. The fires he'd seen so long ago,
fires that had burned in his black eyes since that first flame.
'O'Dell?'
'Sir,'
replied O'Dell.
'Congratulations.'
'Sir,'
said O'Dell and laid the receiver down slowly.
Rare
praise.
But
deserved.
He pulled a
single malt from a drawer in his desk. A retirement party, of sorts. A very
short one, attended by one, thrown for himself.
After
that first drink, his first in many years, O'Dell decided it wouldn't hurt at
all to have another. Or two. He placed the bottle on his console before him and
he drank, slowly but steadily.
Nearly
sixty years.
No
pension. No garden to tend 'til I die.
Just
this.
He
smiled, or grinned. The alcohol and his unique brain ticked all the while, his
eyes jittered and his left hand shook. The glass in his right was steady
enough, though. After a while, he noticed his tie, and his jacket - stained
with cool and cracking blood.
He
sniffed.
'Fuck
it,' he said and downed another glass of good scotch. As the seventeenth missile
hit near the Chinese border, O'Dell was somewhat tipsy. Drunk, even.
Drunk
and full of power - he could feel it, still - the echo of
US
. Like
adrenaline that needed to be burned before he could rest.
He
pushed a button and waited for the man the other end to wake. Middle of the
night. He didn't begrudge people sleeping. Ten second later, his fingers
tapped. Drunk or not, he was ever impatient.
Eventually
a groggy and confused Dr. Boyle answered him.
'Mr.
O'Dell? It's...'
'I
know what time it is, Boyle. Come to my office, would you? Congratulatory
drink.'
'Three
O'Clock in the morning?'
'Oh
yes.'
'Sir,
I'd rather...'
'It's
not optional, Boyle. And stop by the lab on the way. Good man. Bring my some of
that fine U+03BF. If we're to celebrate in style, we'll need more than this
half a bottle of scotch.'
'Sir?'
'Not
optional, either,' said O'Dell, and used just a tiny bit of that residue to
push Boyle, and those guarding the lab, to do precisely what he wanted. Thirty
minutes later Boyle, bleeding from ears and nose came by for that drink. O'Dell
didn't mind sharing at all. After, he shot Boyle through the forehead and
finished the rest himself while gunshots, screams, roaring anger began to fill
the bunker. That was nearly an hour before the first missile hit U.S. soil. Two
hours later, seven Russian cities were nothing but ash. By then, O'Dell was so
drunk he couldn't see straight or even speak.
But
then he didn't need to speak. The only person who called him wouldn't begrudge
him this. Even the man who killed the world needed a night off once in a over
half a century.
'Wouldn't
begrudge
US
a night off, would he?'
Not
me,
but
US.
Had
he even realised, he'd never know why. Just as some men are made to push, there
will always be others who will push back and sometimes there are other forces
which push harder than us all.
Around
seven O'clock in the morning, O'Dell fell into his first sleep for over a year
and dreamed of his children, all inside him, listening to the many deaths
US
had called.
'You
are US, too,'
they whispered in his dreams.
It
was a fine sleep, and so long overdue that it lasted an entire day.
*
Rested
at last, O'Dell picked himself up from the cold office floor where he slept. Despite
the hard bed, he found his old bones hardly ached at all. He straightened his
suit jacket and ran his shaking, palsied palms over his hair.
Bit
of blood, here and there,
he thought, but good to go.
What
did that matter if he looked slightly dishevelled? After over close to sixty
years work, and never a single day's rest.
He
checked, but the phone had not rung in the night.
The
boss had a heart after all.
O'Dell
was the one who'd done all the work, wasn't he? He'd pushed and pulled both the
great and the meek to his will. Decades spent thinking, travelling, planning,
moving people and events the way he needed. Decades with no respite, waiting on
technology to progress, with his eyes and mind always on the future. Waiting for
this
moment.